An airline crashes, as unlikely as they are, occupy a huge amount of mind space in both air travelers and those who are actually rendered too scared to fly. Much of this irrational fear results from a feeling of helplessness – that once things go south on a plane, there’s nothing that can be done but sit idly by waiting for your fate.
While this is true more so than it might be in a car or on a bike, the truth is that many steps can be taken to ensure survival both before and after a crash. Former flight attendant Cheryl A Schwartz took to crowdsourcing forum Quora to share her experience to set people straight on what passengers can do to maximize their chance of survival on a plane.
While the eight points she breaks down all have individual merit, if there’s one more general takeaway, it’s to prepare to survive the impact. Passengers are often correct that aside from bracing for impact and sheltering themselves from airborne objects, the impact is out of their hands. However, once impact occurs, it’s imperative to put yourself in a position to find safety as quickly as possible.
Here is her eight-point plan for survival:
KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. I don’t care if you have flown in 747s for decades, they are NOT all the same. Each time you take your seat you must count the number of rows between your seat and the nearest exits in front of you and behind you on the left and the right.
KNOW HOW TO OPEN THE EXITS. The safety cards show you how to open the doors and whether or not you need to take an extra step to deploy the slide. Know how to open the windows over the wing and how to get out.
KNOW HOW TO PICK THE BEST BRACE POSITION. If you have a seat in front of you, cross your hands on that seat back in front of you and rest your forehead on top of your crossed hands. You are going to flail around during a crash, but with your head supported in front of you your flailing distance is lessened and you have less chance of head and neck whiplash injuries. If there is no seat in front of you, bend over as far as you can and grab your legs behind your knees. Of course you will keep your seat belt tight, tight, tight.
PROTECT FROM FALLING LUGGAGE. Protect your head, neck, and back with a blanket, jacket, coat or whatever you have to dampen the blow of overhead baggage flying out and down upon you and the ceiling falling apart.
KEEP CARRY ON LUGGAGE UNDER SEAT IN FRONT OF YOU. If your bag is under the seat in front of you, that will be one less bag crashing down on you. More important, the luggage under the seat in front of you will act as a barrier for your feet and legs and will keep you from submarining out from under your seat belt and sliding into the space under the seat in front of you where your legs, feet, and ankles will be broken. Your broken body can’t escape.
KEEP YOUR COMPUTER AND CARRY-ON AT YOUR SEAT. TRYING TO EVACUATE WITH THOSE ITEMS MAY COST YOU YOUR LIFE. Stuff can be replaced — you can’t convince me that anything you own is more important than getting your life saved. If I see you trying to come down the aisle with a computer I’ll rip it out of your hands. If another passenger is trying to evacuate and is blocked by your computer he’ll rip it out of your hands. We have 90 seconds to evacuate 600 passengers or 30 passengers. We have trained and know how to do it, and your carry-on doesn’t fit into the mix. Get your body out of your seat, head to the closest exit that is available (not all of the ones you chose before you took off may be available—might be fire at one, might be underwater at another, might be full of crushed seats at another—but a hole in the fuselage may have opened up and that now counts as an exit) and get out. Help others if you can. Then run away and keep running far away from the aircraft in case of explosion.
SURVIVABLE CRASH WITH DEAD PASSENGERS STILL BUCKLED IN SEATS. Most crashes are survivable. Yet, with survivable crashes, crash scene investigators find passengers without a scratch on them still belted in their seats, dead. Sometimes the passenger was just waiting for someone to individually tell them to unbuckle his seat belt and get out or they had no idea what to do. This is why knowing what to do before you take off is necessary. Or perhaps the dead passengers experienced negative panic and just froze in their seats. We are trained to re-enter a crashed airplane to rescue passengers like this. The first officer also goes through the plane looking for passengers. But if there is fire and the smoke has become so thick making re-entry impossible, then we can’t save the ones who remain in their streets. HORRIBLE.
LOOK, LISTEN, LEARN AND HAVE A PLAN. HAVE A NICE FLIGHT.
The “HAVE A NICE FLIGHT” leads me to believe that old habits die hard for retired flight attendants. But there’s weight to what she’s saying, and while these things might read as obvious, the concept of “obvious” might change drastically during an emergency, so the more these steps are drilled into your head, the more you’ll draw on them subconsciously. This is the very reason you’re urged to read the safety procedures and endure the pre-flight presentation for the millionth time.
As regards #6, if you are lucky enough to survive an incident, yet delay your exit to grab luggage, you also expose yourself to intentional harm from fellow passengers. Earlier this year, people were filmed grabbing luggage during an emergency evacuation and it’s...infuriating. This delays the process and puts lives in very real danger.
Drill these into your head not just for your own sake, but the sake of everyone waiting on your to evacuate the plane as well.
Ladder leads out of darkness.Photo credit 
Woman's reflection in shadow.Photo credit 
Young woman frazzled.Photo credit 
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.